


Post Pandemonium

by Bryn Lantry (Bryn)



Category: Blake's 7
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 1991-01-01
Updated: 1991-01-01
Packaged: 2017-11-04 14:13:18
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,437
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/394739
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bryn/pseuds/Bryn%20Lantry
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Blake in a funk after Star One and the Andromedan War</p>
            </blockquote>





	Post Pandemonium

**Author's Note:**

> Printed in the zine 'Resistance 5', 1991  
> Has most of my faults and little else. - But chase up the Swinburne poem. It's Sappho to a woman who has abandoned her: explicit, blasphemous and fierce.

###  
##

Cruel? But love makes all that love him well  
As wise as heaven and crueller than hell.  
Me hath love made more bitter toward thee  
Than death toward man; but were I made as he  
Who hath made all things to break them one by one,  
If my feet trod upon the stars and sun  
And souls of men as his have always trod,  
God knows I might be crueller than God.

Swinburne, 'Anactoria'

##

A mechanical globe bustled through the window on pert wings. It spied a figure slumping awkwardly over a jug of alien spirits.

“Fearless Leader,” the thing addressed this customer of the dingy bar officiously. “I am an emissary from the devil you know. If you wish to see him, go to the street. If not, give me the reason why.”

Blake, logic ever so slightly disjointed, peered up. “Good afternoon, Fitzgerald.”

“Good afternoon, Blake,” was the polite answer.

“Your master's here, then.”

“Avon is in the street.”

“Coy of him to employ an errand-runner. Generally, Fitzgerald, you come to either insult or proposition me. Which function do you suppose he intended to remind me of?”

“I have no access to my controller's intent,” apologised Ensor's contraption – a gift from Blake, named by Vila in honour of an admiral he had once paupered. The one whose 'snooty' testimony condemned him to Cygnus Alpha.

“Neither have I.” Standing, the rebel grunted in a miasma of pain, which shortly dispersed. “Let's see the ordeal through, then, Fitzgerald. Hang around and be witness, won't you? I shouldn't like to get away with the throttling of him.”

Loritol, a mean, argent sun, blistered through the textile protecting the alley. Silhouetted against the shabbiness were Avon's clinging black pants and proud, high-collared coat. He swivelled precisely on a heel. “You're a difficult man to hunt, Blake.”

“I object to being prey.”

“Even when you're half-killed and eluding the hospital?” Avon surveyed the tatty state of his bandage.

“Not dead so far, from which fact I deduce Travis's ghost will be disappointed.”

“Your reasoning never was perfect. I've scoured Epheron for seventy hours – fortunately off-worlders are few and far between. What happened to your bracelet?”

“Smashed.”

“How? Planetfall went safely – Zen had contact.”

“My temper never was perfect.”

Anger ignited Avon's eyes. “You're more fey than I suspected. Or were you smashed yourself at the time?” A stench of liquor had followed Blake from the tavern.

“Just wished I was.”

“Wishes on occasion come true, apparently.”

The rebel chuckled. “I classify merely as mellow, my alpha.”

“Mellow,” repeated Avon. “No, that I have noticed a paucity of for several weeks.” He averted his eyes to the dosshouse. “The grocer told me a wounded humanoid was living here.”

“I traded my pod to a scrap merchant for rent.”

“Get off the street, then. Waste much energy and you might cheer the late, lamented Travis yet.”

“I should hate to cheer the would-be ravager of the Milky Way. There's a decent reason to survive.”

“Once you're in a chair, I shall point out a number of other reasons, Blake.”

A stare impaled him. “You? You're one of my finest arguments for giving life up as a bad job.”

Retracting his helping hand, Avon frowned in the noxious sunbeams.

The bar was a wilderness of strained and graffiteed wood. “Had a rough time?” asked Blake as he indicated his corner haunt. “You look exhausted.”

“Buggered,” agreed Avon, with a curious dance of lashes.

The other swallowed. Pacifically, he suggested, “Eat.”

“Epherony food repulses me.”

So Blake sallied down to bribe the kitchen staff for a non-native meal. On his slow-gaited return, Avon braced his crash to the stool.

“Finish your poisonous ferment, Blake.”

“Am I going to need it?”

Avon switched off his pet from Aristo. “This device makes a useful search party.” 

“A change for Fitzgerald from his procuring duties.”

If his victim squirmed, he did so mentally.

Blake continued, “How about a status report on your ship?”

“Your caprices necessitated leaving Cally in charge. I apportioned a week to look for you, then Liberator returns to rendezvous. Too risky to keep orbit with the remnant of two galaxies' war fleets drifting about this sector. A renegade Space Academy graduate has fastened himself to us. You won't like him. Cally has orders to shoot first and interrogate later should he act suspiciously. I was obliged to bring aboard a rebel's daughter, too, but I believe her less given to hijacking.” Avon glanced from eyes even more green than dark. “Jenna remains unlocated.”

“I trust you've attempted to remedy that.”

“Actually, my priority was yourself. If possible, Cally will have picked her up since I left.”

A strange-coloured curry came, which Avon rashly attacked.

“Frightful?” asked Blake.

“Serendipitously nice.”

“You and your weird tastes.”

In fierce humour, Avon examined him. “Quite. As for the possessive pronoun you applied to the ship --”

“Your ship,” he insisted with an undertow of malice.

“When I complete earning her. I came to ferry you to Earth, Blake. The terminal clause of our agreement.”

Blake had trouble curbing his desolated rage. “I just might rescind that last stipulation. Then you'd have no further business on Epheron. You could be free immediately.”

“Whatever you may be talking about, Liberator won't arrive for three days. In the meantime, I am planetbound.”

“At least three more days yoked to me, Avon?”

The latter pushed away his plate. “Sleep hasn't been high on my list of activities while trying to find you. I thought your injury might be fatal or my week would elapse. I need to sleep now.”

“You can borrow my crawl-space for the afternoon, or pay for another yourself – my funds are short.”

“I shall accept your gracious offer.”

In the fraction of attic where Blake's mess of bedding was heaped, Avon criticised, “Crawl-space was an exaggeration.”

“I'll leave you to it.”

“Where's the spaceport?” Avon had whisked to the window. “If Space Captain Tarrant dispatches my crew, some merchanter will have a visitation.”

As Blake demonstrated the route, pupils lured him like the black pit of religious myth. His maimed body trembled. Privacy was fatal for Kerr Avon and he.

“You belong on your back, too, giving those ribs the opportunity to piece together,” came from a mouth whose sullen comeliness begged to be kissed raw.

“The janitor might hire us a second mattress.”

“A bit late for prudery, Blake. As I recall, we have lain in proximity before.”

“Several times. But that was, as you mention, before.”

Avon peeled the coat, leaving his whole lineaments glued in soft black. Cosy on the quilt, he skewed his hips and nuzzled into neat arms.

Surrendering to siren song, Blake stripped his shirt and reposed, cumbersomely, next to him. Avon's expectation puffed up like a childhood monster to leer from the slanted roof. Nothing was as sultry as the sight of Kerr Avon resisting the need of him. Smiling, Blake pattered fingers along his sternum. Everything was forgotten.

The neighbours probably imagined banshees when Kerr kicked come down his throat. Taciturnity never survived their initiatory kiss. Yet Avon's hand was bitten scarlet in an effort at discipline.

Earnestly fair, Avon said, “I'd barter a tongue for tongue, except I cannot think your health would profit.”

“Commerce wasn't my objective.”

His seared cheek twitched. “Your damned altruistic unilateralism.”

“Don't you comprehend the pleasure of pleasing?”

“Perhaps if I simply finger you, and you remember not to toss --”

“Imagine those wizard hands are any less lethal? In truth, Kerr, my frame of mind is wrong.”

Rejection was an error – Avon resented or mistrusted anything short of extreme and perpetual desire. The single time Blake had pleaded tiredness, the reaction had been a nasty insinuation about Jenna.

Stiff in a corner, Avon inquired, “What did you mean earlier, Blake, about rescinding our agreement?”

“Thought you were sleepy? Or was that one of your machinations to obtain sex?”

“If I had a whim for a final fuck,” pronounced Avon, mean and scathing, “what is that to you?”

“More than a bastard like you would ever understand.”

Their glares smacked with bruising impact. Eventually, Avon's sidled to the escape-hatch of the window.

“Answer my question, Roj Blake,” he said musically, pensive eyes aching.

The rebel seesawed into adoration again. He chest was playing merry hell. “Ah, Avon, I've no answers. To anything. Lost the art.”

“The art of prescription of panaceas for universal ills?”

“Of dressing up as God, yes.”

“Wonderful timing, Blake. You've followed reports on the invasion?”

“That I have.”

“Eighty percent of Servalan's firepower obliterated.”

“Along with Star One.”

“Why so morose? Not enough blood to wade in?”

“Enough to choke on.”

Avon watched equivocally. “When I get you to Earth, you can order the chaos. In your image, this time, my deity.”

“I won't be showing my face on Earth.”

“You're just depressed.”

“Assuredly, Kerr Avon, Alpha 39395, I am depressed.”

“Stop blaming our petty liaison for your mawkish spiritual crisis,” he hissed. “Face the true problem.”

Blake hurled his crippled weight to his feet. “You posed the problem with your blighting clarity on the public flight deck. I worship you. You hate me. And don't think you're safe from my hatred. I can only be civilised for so long.”

“You lie to me, your divineness. You don't trust me, neither do you worship me.”

“That's one thing I won't hear from you, Kerr,” he gulped.

“Over Goth you accused me of being a Federation informer.”

The dry statement flattened Blake. “I wasn't serious.”

“Which makes it sadism rather than paranoia. You hate me, Blake, not less than I hate you – I think more.”

“Such a cold fish as you, was I to tell you in words how I care? I'm not an emotional kamikaze. But you've always known --”

Blake's knees crumpled, the wound punishing his turbulence. Scrambling over, Avon caught his slow pitch, embraced him while he ground his teeth. Pathetically, Avon whispered, “Roj, I'll hate you most if you die.”

The swaying stopped. “Okay now.” Blake knuckled dazed eyes. “Just hits me sometimes. God that's horrible.”

Avon's panicky hands bared the work of the Lazeron Destroyer. “You can still kill yourself,” he warned tersely.

“Stress me too much, and you can. Solution to my troubles. Couldn't pick a handsomer devil of an assassin.” A heavily fond arm ringed Avon.

“No, my unlikely-countenanced seraph. You won't inculpate me in your demise as well as your nervous collapse. I'm going to inflict an antiseptic wash upon you. These dressings are disgraceful.”

“You're hurting,” Blake growled.

“So?”

“So kiss me and I won't swipe you.”

“The function of kissing is foreplay.”

“You're a sorry beggar.”

Humouring him with a peck, Avon was clamped and orally violated until he lost track of whose tongue was whose.

The burly rebel smiled like a gorged lion.

#

Dusk was a mercy on Epheron. Rejuvenated after five hours of sleep curled around Avon, Blake managed a normal pace along the boulevard.

News pictures on a public monitor stopped him dead. Whirlpooling ship hulks, green and glutinous Andromedans, laser-welted troopers. The tapework was amateur – interstellar networks had been extinguished with Star One.

“Pandemonium,” Blake nodded. “Know the etymology, Avon?”

“All demons. The name of the citadel of hell.”

“Some of the demons out there are mine. Engendered in my soul, then loosed to rampage. Like you told me – fanaticism.”

“Neither this war nor the loss of Star One resulted from any action of yours,” said Avon.

“I'm the fulcrum of the whole business. And I contributed as much hatred and vengeance to this mire as Travis.”

“Was hatred why you attacked Star One?”

“Can one decimate civilization from the contrary?”

“From philanthropy? Actually, that's the traditional motive.” Avon prodded him past those images of calamity.

“I'm glad you came, Avon. I needed to resume our disagreement.”

Remote and ironic since waking, the technician answered, “Well now, I'm always willing to disagree with you.”

“Maybe I'm furious with humanity. Maybe I wasn't helping any more, but punishing.”

“What exactly angers you about the species?”

“Wretchedness. From slavery or disappointment, everyone's wretched.”

“A universal inevitability, Blake. The physics of time and space are hostile to flesh. You're in the process of learning a truism.”

The profile beside Blake was as hard and knowledgeable as a stone sphinx. “Why must struggling against your truism warp the struggler?”

“Vanity of vanities, all is vanity. Which is enough to pervert any good intentions.”

“You're a dreary fatalist, Avon.” The rebel steered into a park of winding, gas-lit groves.

“Everything is ephemeral,” lectured Avon, obliviously. “Even the Federation, you know. Persons equally with their personal relationships.”

“Ours, as an illustrative example, Kerr?”

“A miserable fact, from one perspective – yet unchangeably a fact. Death rules our galaxy – not Servalan, and certainly never you.”

Blake noted an absence of observers on the garden path down which he'd led Avon. He menaced, “I'll teach you to philosophise pessimistically about my love for you, Alpha 39395.”

His choice of noun was ignored. “Which philosophy would not offend you?”

“Right now, from you, hedonism.” Ripping and hauling through jacket and pullover, Blake pampered his fingers with the foliage of that chest. “You're so fuckable when you're bleak. Your harshness makes me bleed mostly for you.”

“We'll be arrested.” Avoiding Blake's, his eyes gleamed darkness.

“Least of my worries, my pearly-assed Kerr.”

“Shut up, you maniac. Permit me the choice to refrain.”

“Refrain from the only non-ugly thing remaining to me? No, you haven't my permission.”

Berry bushes secreted them. Blake rolled black other skin down round buttocks. “I never told you about your beauty much, either.”

“You'll further damage yourself.”

“More chance of that while you wriggle.” He shoved Avon's cheek against the springy soil. “From what perspective is the failure of relationships a miserable fact?”

“Yes, from about this one,” was the morbid mutter.

“Good. I'm going to render you as miserable as possible.” Nipping him a pink necklace, Blake utilised the healing cream with which Avon was armed to grease his burns at any opportunity.

“Roj, anything but that.”

“Why? Scared by your susceptibility?”

“It strikes me as a grisly means to suicide.”

“Dying from love of you?”

“That word is inaccurate.”

Blake hooked an elbow about his throat, and submerged himself into annihilation. His arm was clawed, but not for liberty. A destructive mate, Avon always needed to mangle a pillow or a portion of assailing flesh.

Granting him a single, slow stroke – just sufficient to craze – Blake emptied him.

Avon rasped, “No.”

“Tell me again, Kerr. Tell me you want to be free of me.”

“I want to see you damned,” he gritted.

Kissing warm roots of hair, Blake resisted his prisoner's clumsy, backward tugs. “Vanity of vanities, passion is vanity. Refrain now if you can.”

The body underneath him slumped. “You've proving nothing. I confessed two years ago to helplessness against you, in buggery and similar sordid pursuits.”

“And you loathe that.”

The answer was soft. “I've weighed the merits of killing you for it.”

“I believe you.” A blizzard in his mind, Blake pestered the erogenous regions which no-one had mapped like he had.

Avon bloodied the restraining bicep before he would spit, “Please. Please, terminate the damned thing.”

“All you needed to do was ask. Remember, afterwards, how terribly you wanted this.” The rebel concentrated his energies on curing the frustration he'd provoked.

When a pang from the laserblast wilted him, Blake plied dextrous fingers until the hole's hunger was fed. “Enough?” he asked solicitously.

“I suppose.” Rolling over, Avon wiped sweat from his eyes. “You're a ruthless bastard.”

“Confessed. Did it work?”

“That depends on what your ambition was. Humiliation?”

“Try everlasting devotion and fidelity.”

Avon sneered – but his post-coital grimaces never succeeded. “The latter you're assured of. I've no stomach for these comedies with anyone else.”

Flicking soil from the fine jaw, Blake asked, “Then you'll be faithful to me in my absence?”

“As I was before your advent.”

“That sounded romantic.”

“Then you misunderstood.”

“Kerr, am I such a rogue?” Needing wisdom, he searched the being most intimate with him. “That given the chance, I would massacre a justified percentage of those I fight for? From horror of atrocity, commit worse atrocity?”

“Your concern has a less than benign flipside. The computer-supervised worlds escaped falling victim to your frustrated concern. Just to fall victim to accident, however. I am puzzling out the moral.”

“Which you need for when I'm vicious to you, too, from frustrated concern?”

“Whatever. Personally, I was vicious on the flight deck because amputation is shortest. An end, Blake, not a clinging onto futilities.”

Blake whipped off Avon's teleport bracelet. “What would happen if I smashed yours, too?” he wondered, smiling queerly, his trophy in a fist.

“I would contact the nearest insane asylum. No-one rational would throw away such a ship.”

“Ah, but I'm possessionless and desperate. Liberator's yours – a substitute gift, since you refused the other.”

“What other did you offer?”

“My everlasting devotion and fidelity.”

Avon's musculature tightened. “Neither of which I have received, certainly.”

“Jealous monster, aren't you? I've never even thought carnally about Jenna.”

“Merely encouraged her to think carnally about you. Good for crew morale, I imagine.”

Impishly, Blake threatened, “When you desert me, I'm going to philander my way through Freedom City and relay the details to Orac.”

A baleful stare was answer enough. “Surrender the bracelet.”

“Of course, you could wrestle me for it. But I promise to fight until a rib pops my lungs.”

“Then I shall return to my ship through your corpse,” Avon snarled.

“You don't disguise your true colours, do you, my pretty jackal?”

“Nor did I when you agreed to sleep with me regardless. What purpose would crushing our link to Liberator serve?”

“Obvious. To keep you planetbound and in range of my greedy paws. You underestimate how I dote on you.”

“You're being so overbearing and spiteful that I almost believe your declarations.”

Amused, Blake poked a finger. “I suspect you've an idealistic picture of love.”

“Not the kind between the likes of us. I can observe that love in such circumstances is territorial, vindictive and quarrelsome.”

“Did you learn the murky truth only by observation, my Kerr?”

Avon glared, shifty.

“When you disqualify me from loving, is it because you think you do better?”

“I would enjoy shooting you more than hearing of your strayings on Freedom City. You can name that whatever you please.”

“Would you die for me?”

“What?” Avon snapped.

“You, the arch-survivor. Would you give your life for mine? I've caught you risking exactly that.”

With his odd, intermittent honesty, Avon murmured, “I fear I would.”

“Don't sound so glum. Me, I'd betray the rebellion to keep you whole. What does that tell you?”

“That sense demands we stay the hell away from one another.”

Blake laughed, a bit giddily. “Right. And the other thing it means is that we can't.” With a curled finger, he jogged Avon's chin. “Frankly, I don't believe you can abandon me on Earth and fly off into lonely peace.”

Dark, wily eyes dared him. “Therefore, give me my bracelet, and we shall see whether I can free myself or not.”

Nodding, Blake tossed the instrument over. “Care to lay a bet on the outcome? If you forsake me and my overbearing love, I pay, while I live. If you don't, you pay.” An eyebrow wiggled. “I won't tell you what.”

“A deal. To clinch which --” Avon leaned to him for a kiss – as opposed to the more familiar maul.

“First time in history you've kissed me gratuitously.” Blake smacked his lips, eyes radiating warmth. “Nice.”

Features schooled, Avon safeguarded his bracelet under a cuff. “Does this new agreement imply you're resigned to captaining the malcontents of Earth, my hero?”

“If only for the ship passage in your company.”

“Ridiculous, Roj.”

The butt of Blake's laugh was himself. “I am wrapped in you. Nothing else competes. When I study your face, my wound rips from overload.”

Unargumentative, Avon gravely inspected a bramble.

Grinning in victory, Blake struggled to his feet. Space was an oppressive black emptiness overhead. “Once we see Earth, I might trust myself a bit again. Or maybe one can carry on the war knowing one imitates the evil of the enemy. I'll have to find out.” He frowned wryly down to the technician. “Doubt I'll like the answer, either way.”

Avon stood with him, sober. “Nor might we with our wager,” he cautioned.

“True, my hellcat.” Undeterred, however, Blake leaned trammelling weight on his choice as they wandered on.

###  
###


End file.
